.. @ElFl "1 thought you said 1 should take the ball and slowly meander around with it. " . the field." Benitez, one of the coalition's seven elected representatives, sat in his office with his feet up on his desk. De- spite his youth and a playful attitude, he is a powerful speaker. "If you win a case or get a judgment, the problems of slav- ery, of abuses, still remain," he said. "If you change people's consciousness, the people themselves take care of it." When asked about the government's role, he shrugged. "Who cares what happens to a bunch of pelagatos-a bunch of nobodies?" The group's headquarters is a dilapi- dated storefront on South Third Street, next to the pickup spot where the work- ers congregate each morning. The paint IS peeling off the walls and the carpet is ripped and threadbare. The principal furnishings include a lumpy old couch, two desks, a few dozen metal folding chairs, and a large papier-mâché rep- lica of the Statue of Liberty; holding a tomato bucket. The walls are adorned with photographs of protest marches, cartoons depicting labor relations be- tween bosses and workers, and news- paper articles in Spanish, English, and Creole. Migrant workers stream through all day and into the evening, buying tortillas, J arritos soft drinks, and mole- sauce mix at the coalition's co-op gro- cery store. The place has a feel some- where between a college social club and a 122 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21 & 28, 2003 . Third World political-party branch office. The group's representatives come from Haiti, Mexico, Guatemala, and the United States. They are paid two hundred and seventy-seven dollars a week-slightly more than a farmworker earning minimum wage for a forty-hour week. They live in trailers and shacks, and work seven days a week, and their conversations seldom stray from the subject of workers' rights. There is a fa- milial esprit de corps among the leader- ship, but it's not hard to offend them. Greg Asbed and Laura Germino, a couple now in their late thirties, who met at Brown University; helped start the coalition, in the mid-nineties, while working for Florida Rural Legal Ser- vices. Germino is an intense, graceful woman whose family has been in Flor- ida for six generations. She drives a sil- ver 1970 Malibu-her "muscle car," as she calls it-but she wouldn't seem out of place at a country club. Asbed is a handsome, atWetic man with stubbled cheeks who favors old T-shirts and worn jeans; he spends three months a year harvesting watermelons with other coalition members. Before coming to Florida, Germino volunteered with the Peace Corps in Burkina Faso, and Asbed worked for a community-development organization in rural Haiti. Asbed says that, even after working in Haiti, he was appalled to learn what went on in South Florida. "I mean, it's this hidden aspect of life in the country that you wouldn't expect ex- isted," he said. "Until you actually hook up with it and get an in-depth, insider's tour of the world, it's incredible. You don't know what's out there." The couple was inspired by local Haitian, Mexican, and Central American activists who were beginning to organize workers, and, after launching a general strike of more than three thousand migrants, the coalition began to hold regular meetings. Both Germino and Asbed are re- luctant to discuss their own lives. When I asked Germino whether her upbring- ing had anything to do with her choices, she said only, "I was raised to think that people should be treated justly and that you're supposed to live free and that every human being should be treated as such. I mean, those are pretty basic." She laughed. "Everybody should at least have that kind of consciousness!" When I pressed for more, she answered abruptly) laughing again, but with final- ity; "This has nothing to do with your story! Don't make me be the sto The workers are the heroes!" According to Germino, modem slav- ery exists not because to day's workers are immigrants or because some of them don't have papers but because agriculture has always managed to sidestep the labor rules that are imposed upon other indus- tries. When the federal minimum-wage law was enacted, in 1938, farmworkers were excluded from its provisions, and re- mained so for nearly thirty years. Even today) farmworkers, unlike other hourly workers, are denied the right to over- time pay. In many states, they're ex- cluded from workers' compensation and unemployment benefits. Farmworkers receive no medica] insurance or sick leave, and are denied the right to organ- ize. Germino said, "There's no other in- dustry in America where employers have as much power over theIr employees." F ive of South Florida's six recent slavery cases involve workers pick- ing tomatoes or citrus. Taco Bell buys millions of pounds of tomatoes each year through local packing companies. According to Jonathan Blum, vice- president for public relations of YUM, the parent of Taco Bell, the company